German Windows-HPC user group recap

The Second Meeting of the German Windows-UPC User Group took place on March 30th and 31st in Dresden with about 80 participants. The ZIH of TU Dresden was the kind host of this event, which included both a series of talks and several booth places for various vendors. …

Personally, I think this event was successful. We had a good mix of technical talks as well as presentations of how and where Windows-HPC is used today. Some of these users have presented at last year’s event already – they made progress, but most were new. The versions of the HPC ISV-Codes that will be released this year will be well-integrated into HPC Server 2008 (for some products it will be the second version supporting Windows-HPC), but it seems most codes still have quite some potential for out-of-the-box performance improvements. The service providers – such as cluster integrators – that were presenting and / or had booths at the event have made their first experiences (good and bad, of course) with HPC on Windows. Many thanks to the sponsors for supporting this event, in alphabetical ordering: GNS Systems, Intel, Microsoft, Megware, Myricom, Sun and Transtec! The presentation program consisted of several sessions of which I will provide a brief summary in the rest of this post.

This kind of post is low hanging fruit for the web — using peer publishing to bring a community up to date on happenings at events that only a few can attend. As I’ve offered before, if you got to an event and can find the time to write up a few paragraphs about who you saw or what you learned, email it to me and I’ll post it here. Or if you have your own blog, post it there and I’ll point to it.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team splits on the topic of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon publish its new rules for ensuring an even playing field for Internet Bandwidth. "Dan doesn't like the idea one bit. Henry disagrees and thinks we need Net Neutrality to keep the Comcasts of the world from running amok. As for Rich, he just finds the whole argument rather amusing since it's pretty much a done deal." [Read More...]